


A Brazen Hymn

by Hlessi



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Kink Meme, M/M, but also Hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 16:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2235681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hlessi/pseuds/Hlessi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What impudence, He thought. The foolishness of mortals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Brazen Hymn

**Author's Note:**

> Response to [this prompt](http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/8478.html?thread=18738718#t18738718) over at the Hobbit Kink Meme.
> 
> I should warn you that I've taken some severe theological liberties.

When the last tremors had shaken loose from the hot ground and molten rock had hardened to black, He turned His back on the smoke and the ash and He went back into the Mountain.

The darkness beyond the Gates was a relief. The air soothed scalded skin and diluted the stink of burning hair and scorched flesh. The pain was of a magnitude that no mortal creature could have borne, and He vigilantly withheld it from the child, took upon Himself the blistering tongue, the boiling brain, the liquefying eyes. He had done as the child had asked and now the child must pay the price of his asking. But He would at least spare the child this.

The Mountain stank of the fire-drake. The stone was cold and the light was weak. Treasure and gold gleamed beguilingly from the shadows, but He knew that such had no hold over the child. He did not need to look within the child's heart to know what did. Fresh, sweet air, the damp green grass, the open light the colour of honey. The whisperings of tree and leaf.

That was where the child would like to die. But that was where He could not take him.

His hold on the child diminished even as the child diminished. Death was hard upon them, and He, who could not die, felt a measure of unfamiliar wonder at the nearness of it. The great mystery, the only blessing which He and His kindred were denied, and it was breathing over him now. His wife had told Him once that death was kind. That He would see that this was so. But now, here, He found that He felt only loss. He had been with this child for every moment of his life, and He was as He was. That He must lose the child to an end more final than any He had ever known was unthinkable, as bitter as gall. He was not His wife: He could not reconcile Himself to loss.

_Don't be sad,_ the child said.

He could not take the child anywhere with meaning. The body was too weak. He could not reach the diamond mines, where sparks of rising and falling light might give the child stars by which to die. He could not get the child alive to the grottoes below, where an acid lake ringed by limestone and gypsum was as blue as any summer sky. The moss caves were beyond them, where the pale, sibilant fungi would numb his pain and remind him of the grassy hill beneath which he had been born.

When the bones of the child's knees, charred by His fire, became too brittle for anything but shattering, He was forced to set the body down where he was, in a shallow depression of cracked stone beside a broken statue blackened by old dragonfire.

There was more light than was needed for the child's ruined eyes. They were not so distant from the Gates, not as distant as He would have had it. He would have this child die in peace.

_They're alive,_ said the child. _They're all alive, aren't they? My friends._

They were. He had brought his wrath down upon the enemy a bow shot from the Gates as the Firstborn reckoned it. Those that had ignored his warning would be sight-struck for days, but the child's friends should be unscathed.

_Oh good,_ sighed the child.

Breathing was becoming difficult. The child's shrivelled lungs were failing. He was almost beyond pain.

He raised the child's ruined head to watch the Dwarf approach.

Thrain's son was a different creature from the Dwarf He had spoken to on the wall. The arrogance, the greed, the hate—it had all been quenched by grief. The Dwarf who neared now was not the proud figure who would have thrown the child to his death; this Dwarf wore no crown.

This Dwarf was weeping.

“Mahal,” said Thrain's son. His voice was wretched. Broken. “Mahal. Maker. Father.”

Thorin son of Thrain, He said, with His own Voice in the child's mouth.

Thorin son of Thrain had cast off his kingly armour. He wore no jewels, and his hair was loose. Clad in ashes and borrowed clothes, he neared his Maker.

Before His blackened feet, Thorin knelt and raised his open, supplicating hands.

“I beg you,” said Thrain's son. “I beg you, Mahal. Let him live. Make him anew and let him live.”

_Oh no,_ whispered the child. He could feel the child's heart shrinking.

“I beg you. Mahal.” Thorin's tears had made lines of clean skin in his dirtied face. “Anything but him.”

Such short-sightedness, He thought. It was a fault that fractured deep into the eldest line. He had seen it even in Durin. He said, It is too late, son of Thrain. This cannot be undone.

The sound that Thorin made then. A sound of shattering stone, of tearing iron. “No. I beg you.”

Despite Himself, despite the child murmuring to him, His temper began to rouse. You did not care so much for the life of this child before now, son of Thrain, He said. The hour is late for you to regret your own devising.

“No,” said Thorin. His hands, coarse from years of what he'd considered low labour, clenched into fists. “No. Father, not him. I will pay any price but him.”

You have not paid it, He said, pitiless. He has paid it on your behalf. So you have your life, and your Mountain. Be content.

_Please,_ pleaded the child, _please, Aule, don't be cruel. Please don't be cruel to him. Oh my poor Thorin._

A convulsion gripped the child's body. He turned His attention to separating the child from the agony, leaving the body to its throes. It was becoming more and more difficult to shield the child; he was slipping, heartbeat by heartbeat, ever further from Him.

_There will come a time when you must let him go,_ His wife had told him. Whose people were such breakable, impermanent creatures. Let him go, She had said. That was the right thing to do, the natural thing. He would let this child go, as He was meant to, and then He would depart Himself. Why linger? Why prolong the inevitable? And yet.

And yet, He thought, and turned his attention back to the body. Thorin had come up beside it, and was holding the child's body despite its being, by this time, scarcely more than meat held together by clothes and His will.

“Let me go with him,” Thorin was crying. “I beg you, Mahal, if you cannot save him, let me go with him. I cannot be sundered from him. Let me go where he goes!”

What impudence, He thought. The foolishness of mortals. Begging for this, demanding that. Expecting the impossible. Fussing and noising when they didn't get their way. Good grief, why did He ever make these stubborn Dwarves in the first place. They were more trouble than they were worth.

The child was laughing. The child was laughing and weeping.

_Please take care of him, Aule,_ the child sobbed, and He could not help remembering the child as he'd been at seven years old, snivelling over a scraped shin. _Tell him I love him. Tell him I'll miss him. Tell him I forgive him everything. Tell him it wasn't his fault._

The child was fading. The child was dying.

Son of Thrain, He said, with the child's cold, blistered lips. He is dying.

Thorin wailed. It was something He had never heard from this Dwarf before.

Son of Thrain, He said, he is dead. I cannot restore him. I cannot send you with him.

The wail became a scream. There was despair in this scream. There was the madness of one who had endured too much too long and could not go on.

With an unspeakable effort, He raised the child's dead hand and slapped Thorin in his face.

The scream choked off. Thorin's wet eyes stared down at Him.

Then He sank down into the silence, and He raised the child up into his body.

He could not do it long. The greater part of the child was dead, and much of His effort was gone into keeping the pain away. But He gave them a moment. Just one moment.

Then the child was falling away, from Him and from everything, away into death, and He Himself was departing from the body He had accompanied into the world such a few years ago, leaving its spoiled remnants behind in Thorin's arms.

And yet, He thought.

As He was freed of the child's mind and body, He could feel all His might returning to Him, all that from which He had been proscribed by the child's mortal flesh. He could feel the pull of His own body, of Valinor and his wife. He could feel the intent of His return.

And yet.

He had always known that the child would die. And as He had never seen a hobbit in Valinor or in His own halls, or even in His wife's gardens, it seemed self-evident that hobbits were of the Younger Children, and also received the Gift as had been given to Men. He, then, could have no influence over the child's fate, and Thorin son of Thrain had always been fated to be divided from his love, who now and forever would exist outside the Music.

And yet.

He had already once defied ERU, and received forgiveness for His repentance. He did not think forgiveness would be so easily granted should He be so wilful as to defy HIM again. The Dwarves were His; the hobbits were not. It was not His place.

And yet.

_Oh my poor Thorin._

Bebother, He thought.

He turned away from His own immortal body. He turned away from Valinor. He turned away from His wife. He looked, as none of His kindred did, for death.

The child was almost gone.

My halls are large, He thought, and My children stubborn. Thorin son of Thrain will never be at peace without Bilbo Baggins. There will be no rest for him. My halls would grow dark with his grief.

This was different from the last time. This was no new race, but one small hobbit. HE will never miss just one, He told Himself. One little hobbit, who would even notice? They practically fit in your pocket. You could hide one under your beard. They're like spoons. It'll probably be fine.

Somewhere in the distance, He thought He could hear His wife laughing.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "A Pagan's Prayer" by Charles Baudelaire.


End file.
